The Last Star Wars

SOME SPOILERS AHEAD.

Rewatching The Force Awakens on Netflix the night before the next film in the series opened, I came to realize something. Despite my best efforts to keep Star Wars at emotional arm’s length, to regard it as nothing more than the money-milling asset it is, to dismiss its high points and low points as ultimately meaningless, the venerable franchise was too important a part of my childhood to ignore. Forty years later, Star Wars remained important to me.

The next afternoon, I hiked out for a matinee of The Last Jedi. There was no line. Gone, it seems, are the days of queuing up hours early to get a ticket. There are too many theatres, too many screenings, too many post-release streaming options, and ultimately too many Star Wars films to stretch a horde of people around the block like it’s 1983 again.

Still, I felt a certain relief once I had my ticket in hand. I was going to see the new Star Wars movie before anyone had a chance to spoil it for me.

See it I did. And my initial reaction was, “That was a heaping pile of meh.” The film, it seems, spoiled itself.

A first impression is not always the right impression. Despite answering some initial questions about what I thought of The Last Jedi, I thought it would be prudent to sit on my opinion and let it percolate a while longer. Over the course of the opening weekend, I’ve had time to more carefully reflect on what I saw, and what it all means, and indeed I’ve revised my verdict somewhat.

I now consider Star Wars: The Last Jedi to be the new worst Star Wars movie ever made. So…uh…congratulations everyone involved!

Am I saying it’s worse than The Phantom Menace? No. I’m saying it’s even worse than the Star Wars Holiday Special. Cocaine-fuelled TV-variety-show trainwreck though that was, it was still Star Wars, and it didn’t piss all over the characters and their legacy. Even when Carrie Fisher was forced to sing that fuck-awful Life Day song, there was a certain laughable dignity to it.

But this… This hits a new low on so many fronts. I could go through it scene by scene, refuting apologists, but there’s going to be a million dissections of the film out there on the web. Anything I’m likely to say here would be redundant, and the last thing Star Wars needs is more rehashes and redundancy. Let’s just focus on one thing: the disgraceful treatment of Luke Skywalker.

I waited 34 years to see Luke Skywalker, one of the towering icons of my childhood, back in action. What I got was a depressed and bitter, tittie-squeezing, cowardly hermit who has let all his friends and family down, grumping about, forsaking everything he ever worked for or believed in, and acting like a total dick. Even his final sacrifice is literally phoned in, and plays more like a sad, lonely suicide. They may as well have had him die an inglorious death by autoerotic asphyxiation in his man-cave—thinking about those green-milk spewing titties, no doubt.

What a wasted opportunity. This trilogy was the last-chance last-hurrah for three characters who ushered in modern blockbuster Hollywood, and made many people in that town rich beyond their wildest dreams. Killing off Han Solo was forgivable. Harrison Ford had lobbied for the character’s death before the original trilogy even played out, so it only made sense he would return and promptly die in Episode VII. Carrie Fisher dropping dead in real life has effectively ended Leia as of this film. Luke was the last hope for a meaningful continuation of what once was. Everything was reasonably set up for that by the end of The Force Awakens. But, apparently, there’s no one at the helm. No overarching storyline. They just let the new guy come in and write the next chapter however he pleased. He tossed away plot lines he didn’t like, killed off characters he didn’t give a shit about, and threw in a mess of junk and loose ends for J. J. Abrams to try to stitch together when he returns for Episode IX.

Disney has been firing directors off of Star Wars projects left right and centre. There seems to be a lot of second guessing of high-level decisions. But I think they fired one director too few. I would have sacked Rian Johnson the moment he handed in a draft of this dog’s breakfast script. My assessment of him has gone from “promising new voice worth keeping an eye on” to “irredeemable hack.” The fact that he was offered his own off-shoot Star Wars trilogy after delivering this cookie-cutter insult suggests a certain insanity in the ranks. Disney needs to dump Kathleen Kennedy immediately and search the galaxy for a showrunner who can function as the Star Wars equivalent of Kevin Feige, or their four-billion-dollar investment is going to capsize and sink.

It’s too late to win me over at this point. I’m out. Star War was a magical lightning-in-a-bottle trilogy that ran from 1977 to 1983. Everything since then has either been a cynical cash grab or elaborate fan fiction. Sometimes both at once. I’ve searched my feelings, and I know this to be true.